4 ms·

I've read that the scam is that they will ask you to send the money back. If you do, you'll be out of the money because the money they sent you will disappear a

by Aulig 3y ago

I've read that the scam is that they will ask you to send the money back. If you do, you'll be out of the money because the money they sent you will disappear after a while because Paypal pulls it back (probably because they sent it to you from a stolen credit card or something like that)

ano-ther 3y ago
Thanks. There must be quite an operation behind this then to make it viable. Input: stolen credit cards, email addresses to send to, email addresses for opening a PayPal account. Attrition: credit card gets blocked, PayPal email gets blocked, recipient doesn’t react or doesn’t send the money back, recipient won’t fall for it twice. 5 Euro per successful attempt — 200 successes per 1000 Euro (minus the cost for acquiring credit cards and email addresses) — sounds like a low margin business.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Google “PayPal duplicate money trick”. People are actively sending money from their own account to PayPal, claiming it fraud and doubling their money. They don’t care if they get locked out if they make $500-$1000. Change the input from their own money to a stolen PayPal account. It’s a payday for them (that eventually comes back to haunt them)
  - hedora 3y ago
    But, why use a random person’s paypal account as the destination?
- xp84 3y ago
  When your time is cheap, making a few bucks a day scamming probably beats working all day carrying bricks or working in a diamond mine, or whatever.
- jrockway 3y ago
  I think the key to this scam is to send fake emails pretending to be paypal. So you email someone "hey i accidentally sent you money, can you send it back" and then you also send from your paypa1@gmai1.com email address something like "so and so sent you money on paypal, spend it right now wow this is amazing". Paypal is never actually involved until you send them money. (I think these are all Zelle scams these days. I don't really know what Zelle is, but it seems like all the banks got together and were like "how can we really screw over our customers?" and this is what they came up with. You really can't reverse transactions? Why would I use a bank for that when I can easily lose all my money to scams with Bitcoin? It's so crazy to me.)
  - kmoser 3y ago
    With great power comes great responsibility. Non-reversible transactions are dangerous in the sense that you can't reverse them, but that's the case with cash (not to mention handing over physical goods). But it cuts both ways: it means if somebody pays you what they owe you, there's no way for them to claw it back later. tl;dr Want a permanent transaction? Use cash or Zelle. Want the ability to reverse a transaction or dispute a charge? Use a check or credit card.
  - hedora 3y ago
    It is good for stuff like craigslist or splitting checks. The following scam works with craigslist + paypal, but not zelle: You sell me an expensive item. I paypal you the money. You check your account and see that the money landed. I walk away with the item and immediately reverse the paypal transaction. Note that the “I sell you a stolen/broken thing that will definitely be traced to you” scam works on both paypal and zelle, since the time to discovery of the scam is long enough to pull the money out of PayPal. I’m not sure how hard it is to set up a burner zelle account and use it for untraceable crimes. It’s apparently easy to do that with paypal. But, to your point, yes, they’re both pretty terrible services from a consumer protection standpoint.
coffeebeqn 3y ago
Some of them are also not actual PayPal links they’re just phishing emails that’ll steal your credentials if you click through and try to sign in
tlavoie 3y ago
We've had a variation of this attempted when trying to sell a vehicle online. The scam is not specific to the item being sold, because they have no intention of picking it up. Rather, you are sent a realistic Paypal money transfer notification, and are asked to put most of it (since the amount is higher than the purchase price) into some sort of Moneygram transfer "for the person who will pick it up." Paypal has an email listed on their site, IIRC, where you can send these, and it will tell you if it really came through them. Ours had not.
- genewitch 3y ago
  > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpayment_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpayment_scam

by Aulig 3y ago

ano-ther 3y ago

Thanks. There must be quite an operation behind this then to make it viable. Input: stolen credit cards, email addresses to send to, email addresses for opening a PayPal account. Attrition: credit card gets blocked, PayPal email gets blocked, recipient doesn’t react or doesn’t send the money back, recipient won’t fall for it twice. 5 Euro per successful attempt — 200 successes per 1000 Euro (minus the cost for acquiring credit cards and email addresses) — sounds like a low margin business.

grepfru_it 3y ago
Google “PayPal duplicate money trick”. People are actively sending money from their own account to PayPal, claiming it fraud and doubling their money. They don’t care if they get locked out if they make $500-$1000. Change the input from their own money to a stolen PayPal account. It’s a payday for them (that eventually comes back to haunt them)
- hedora 3y ago
  But, why use a random person’s paypal account as the destination?
xp84 3y ago
When your time is cheap, making a few bucks a day scamming probably beats working all day carrying bricks or working in a diamond mine, or whatever.
jrockway 3y ago
I think the key to this scam is to send fake emails pretending to be paypal. So you email someone "hey i accidentally sent you money, can you send it back" and then you also send from your paypa1@gmai1.com email address something like "so and so sent you money on paypal, spend it right now wow this is amazing". Paypal is never actually involved until you send them money. (I think these are all Zelle scams these days. I don't really know what Zelle is, but it seems like all the banks got together and were like "how can we really screw over our customers?" and this is what they came up with. You really can't reverse transactions? Why would I use a bank for that when I can easily lose all my money to scams with Bitcoin? It's so crazy to me.)
- kmoser 3y ago
  With great power comes great responsibility. Non-reversible transactions are dangerous in the sense that you can't reverse them, but that's the case with cash (not to mention handing over physical goods). But it cuts both ways: it means if somebody pays you what they owe you, there's no way for them to claw it back later. tl;dr Want a permanent transaction? Use cash or Zelle. Want the ability to reverse a transaction or dispute a charge? Use a check or credit card.
- hedora 3y ago
  It is good for stuff like craigslist or splitting checks. The following scam works with craigslist + paypal, but not zelle: You sell me an expensive item. I paypal you the money. You check your account and see that the money landed. I walk away with the item and immediately reverse the paypal transaction. Note that the “I sell you a stolen/broken thing that will definitely be traced to you” scam works on both paypal and zelle, since the time to discovery of the scam is long enough to pull the money out of PayPal. I’m not sure how hard it is to set up a burner zelle account and use it for untraceable crimes. It’s apparently easy to do that with paypal. But, to your point, yes, they’re both pretty terrible services from a consumer protection standpoint.

coffeebeqn 3y ago

Some of them are also not actual PayPal links they’re just phishing emails that’ll steal your credentials if you click through and try to sign in

tlavoie 3y ago

We've had a variation of this attempted when trying to sell a vehicle online. The scam is not specific to the item being sold, because they have no intention of picking it up. Rather, you are sent a realistic Paypal money transfer notification, and are asked to put most of it (since the amount is higher than the purchase price) into some sort of Moneygram transfer "for the person who will pick it up." Paypal has an email listed on their site, IIRC, where you can send these, and it will tell you if it really came through them. Ours had not.

genewitch 3y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpayment_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overpayment_scam